PRINCETON — Greta (Halberg) Kelly and her husband, Stephen, are the new owners of Spoons at 541 S. Main St. in Princeton.

After buying the building at an auction earlier this year on Jan. 31, the couple renovated the entire building, starting with three upstairs apartments and then the bar and restaurant area on the first floor.

The bar front and bar stools are original to keep the personality of The Spoon — the business which occupied the space for the past several years and was an icon in the South Main Street district — while the rest is new except for an old-fashioned scale where a person puts a penny into it and finds out their weight.

“I came to the sale to buy the scale and turned out buying the whole building,” said Greta, who graduated from Princeton High School in 1987. “I remember coming in here as a little girl with my dad (Gary Halberg) and grabbing one of the coins that were on the bar to weigh myself.”

Kelly also knew John and Jeff Sitterly, the former owners of The Spoon, as friends, and went to PHS the same time as Jeff Sitterly.

Kelly, who lives in Peoria, came to Princeton on that Saturday to the auction not expecting to buy the entire building, but eventually did.

“We wanted to do something here to keep local people in town to eat and not have to drive to Peru,” she added. “We wanted to do something different for the town. We also wanted to draw people to town from other towns in the area.”

To go along with the name of the business, the Kellys have placed spoons of all sizes around the restaurant and bar as centerpieces on the tables holding the salt and pepper shakers plus four life-sized spoons hanging on one of the walls.

“We thought it would be a fun thing to do,” she said.

Spoons is open seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays and from 11 a.m. to midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Spoons has a Facebook presence. Its website address is www.spoonsrestaurant.net. The phone number is 815-872-9001.

David Jones, the general manager and executive chef of Spoons, used to lived in Milwaukee, Wis. He had also worked at Starved Rock, and is married to Megan Kohr, a native of Princeton.

Spoons will have its grand opening celebration this Saturday with Santa Claus being there from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Other activities include drink and dinner specials, giveaways and drawings.

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